In the 1940s, at the start of Zhang Yimou’s wrenching Chinese epic To Live, the dissolute hero, Fugui (Ge You), loses everything – his home, his family, his wife, Jiazhen (Gong Li) – at the gambling tables. It’s one of the film’s bitter ironies that this cataclysm may be Fugui’s luckiest moment, for after the civil war brings Mao to power, the penniless Fugui can pass as a proletarian and stave off the axe of political retribution. But as the film progresses from the Great Leap Forward in the ’50s through the madness of the Cultural Revolution – captured with a whiplash mix of black comedy and tragedy – the man who’s lost everything discovers there’s far more to lose. Superbly shot, this angry, tear-drenched saga is Zhang’s (““Raise the Red Lantern’’) most openly emotional film. If it’s better at charting the tidal waves of misfortune that break upon Fugui and his family than at exploring nuances of character, maybe that’s Zhang’s point: in Mao’s China, individualism was the most dangerous luxury.
